Ships And
Steamers, With Black Sides And Flaunting Colours, Are Moored
Everywhere, Showing Their Flags, Russian And English, Austrian,
American,
And Greek; and along the quays country ships from the
Black Sea or the islands, with high carved poops and
Bows, such as
you see in the pictures of the shipping of the seventeenth century.
The vast groves and towers, domes and quays, tall minarets and
spired spreading mosques of the three cities, rise all around in
endless magnificence and variety, and render this water-street a
scene of such delightful liveliness and beauty, that one never
tires of looking at it. I lost a great number of the sights in and
round Constantinople through the beauty of this admirable scene:
but what are sights after all? and isn't that the best sight which
makes you most happy?
We were lodged at Pera at Misseri's Hotel, the host of which has
been made famous ere this time by the excellent book "Eothen," - a
work for which all the passengers on board our ship had been
battling, and which had charmed all - from our great statesman, our
polished lawyer, our young Oxonian, who sighed over certain
passages that he feared were wicked, down to the writer of this,
who, after perusing it with delight, laid it down with wonder,
exclaiming, "Aut Diabolus aut" - a book which has since (greatest
miracle of all) excited a feeling of warmth and admiration in the
bosom of the god-like, impartial, stony Athenaeum. Misseri, the
faithful and chivalrous Tartar, is transformed into the most quiet
and gentlemanlike of landlords, a great deal more gentlemanlike in
manner and appearance than most of us who sat at his table, and
smoked cool pipes on his house-top, as we looked over the hill and
the Russian palace to the water, and the Seraglio gardens shining
in the blue.
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